Clark: Taking a look back at Hurricane Floyd

Saturday

Jun 22, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 22, 2013 at 8:05 PM

Richard Clark / Columnist

With the ENC hurricane section inserted in today’s Free Press, it got me to thinking about being prepared, what to expect — and it made me want to share my personal experience. Being from Virginia, for the most part, I was always aware of hurricanes, but they really just brought rain and so forth. However, once you come to Eastern North Carolina, you realize it’s a little bit different animal. North Carolina, and particularly the eastern portion of the state, gets hit with regularity. North Carolina ranks in the top five in hurricane strikes and major hurricanes making landfall. Nearly everyone that has been in our region for more than a few years has some sort of hurricane story. My story goes back to Hurricane Floyd. By 1999, I had been in and out of Greenville for some time. Canceling classes due to the threat of a storm had become commonplace, and frankly, the night before had morphed into, essentially, an extra night to go out and have some fun. As most that were here remember, a couple of smaller storms had previously rolled through, drenching the area prior to Floyd’s arrival. So we all heard classes were canceled and figured the same scenario that played out time after time in which the storm turned out to be much ado about nothing would play out again. Famous last words right? Oh, how wrong we were. The next day, upon waking up groggy from — let’s say a long night — we were hit in the face with a full-blown flood. However, that was just the beginning. My girlfriend at the time and I both had to work that day so we decided to tough it out and stay in Greenville. Another mistake. By the time we got off work, Greenville had essentially become a peninsula. There was only one way out of town and that was to go far south and attempt, and I say attempt, to find a clear path over to the highways heading north. Further complicating the matter was that the power was now out. This meant you had the cash in your pocket. Period. You couldn’t use your card at the gas pump. You couldn’t use a credit card to get food. And the gas pumps no longer worked. Also around this time, my girlfriend returned to her apartment to find it full of water. While we were at work, the Tar River had risen enough that it now engulfed several of the adjacent apartment complexes. With maybe $100 in cash between the two of us and neither car having more than a half of tank of gas, the decision was made for us. We were now in for the long haul. We were in decent shape as far as food went and my apartment, though not nearly as clean as hers, was completely dry. So the next few days, we laid low and attempted to fight off the tumultuous heat. Ironically, we quickly found out that we were not quite in as good a shape with food as we thought. As a few days turned into a week, much of the food we “thought” had became uneatable. Around the 4 or 5 day mark, we decided to venture out to find out what was open. Lo and behold, we hit the jackpot as the Harris-Teeter near my apartment was open. However, it was quite a surreal scene as they were only letting four or five people in at the time. If you didn’t have cash, you were out of luck. People were running around like it was the end of times. I literally say people, not college kids, but older “grown-ups” were fighting for the last of the batteries and some canned goods. After securing a haul that was clearly meant for a billy goat to eat, we went around the back of the building where they were handing out bags of ice. The scene was something I will never forget. Keep in mind it had only been a week or so with no power. I saw a guy in his 30s push an old lady down on the ground to get a bag of ice. A bag of ice! I always said if the terrorists really wanted to get to us, they should hit our power grid. People lose their minds. One area that none of us foresaw at the time was lack of telephone service. Keep in mind that this was the dawn of the cell phone era and the service was much less reliable than it is today. And combine that with the fact that most us were using cordless phones for our landlines and you had a recipe for disaster. The saving grace for my entire apartment complex was one guy on the second floor had an old plug straight into the wall phone. Sadly, I can not remember his name, but he saved many of our families a lot of worry by allowing his personal phone to become a “community” phone. It was interesting to see how dark everything became at night, as well, as we actually talked to our neighbors instead of burying ourselves inside our dwellings. I had lived at that particular complex for more than two years and only knew one person prior to Floyd. The point to this rambling story is really just that you never know when it comes to these storms. We didn’t have power for nearly three weeks, which doesn’t sound like much, but when you factor in the heat and inability to really move around freely, it seemed more like an eternity. I will always remember scenes like when the water receded and full size SUVs were revealed to have been under the water level completely. Or the high water mark on the side of apartment buildings midway up the second floor. It was an unreal scene. I never fully appreciated the magnitude of these storms until that event. We now live in a time of endless news loops and constant image bombardment. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is seared into our brains by now, but for me, Floyd showed me what the real lick was.

Richard Clark is the universal desk chief for Halifax ENC. You can reach him at 910-219-8452 or at Richard.Clark@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at @kpaws22.

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